the Complexion Connexion

RIM's attempts -- plural -- to catch up to Apple in the smartphone space have been prima facie pathetic.

The Blackberry Bold was still-born as an iPhone lookalike without the touch-screen. Now Storm lacks WiFi. I mean, what are they smoking up in Waterloo?

We know that the high-profile master of gadget punditry, David Pogue, is a Mac-o-phile, but even still it is remarkable that here he has pulled no punches ...

Says the Pogue ...

I haven’t found a soul who tried this machine who wasn’t appalled, baffled or both. And that’s before they discovered that the Storm doesn’t have Wi-Fi. It can’t get onto the Internet using wireless hot spots, like the iPhone or other BlackBerrys.

... But wait, there's less.

It's been two years now since iPhone launched to define the usable smartphone market segment and it is entirely validating of Steve Jobs' talent that competitors can't get even close this many months along.

Larry coined it -- "iPhone Envy". It's the feelings Windows Mobile and Blackberry (the people responsible for those brands) have in regard to the innovative iPhone Experience.

All smartfone brands are converging on The iPhone Experience, which I keep saying in Tufte's way, is devoid of administrative debris. That's a pretty high hurdle, as we shall come to find out, for the sucky interface designers at the leading software and hardware companies who are trapped in the legacy features of their past products and in the soggy, undemanding design cultures of their corporations.

HTC Touch (a lame device Sprint is marketing ... lame because it runs Windows-sucky-Mobile) is one of the mee-too iPhones.

Blackberry's Bold is RIM's defensive attempt to keep Crackberry addicts in the glass house from migrating to Apple's opium den next door. I mean, an iPhone with less screen and full of text keys is simply a Blackberry with iPhone characteristics (I'm thinking of the Chinese bureaucrats who said, in effect, 'we seek a centralized system with capitalist characteristics' -- or some hilariously fudged nonsequitur like that).

Now Microsoft, according to its usual lame PR playbook, is trying to rally its mobile partners with a pep talk designed & timed to usurp at least some mojo from Apple's 3G iPhone marketing ramp.

Conclusions. I have none yet. Unfortunately for the truly innovative, customers are pretty dumb and after a while tend to be unaware of the real original. Look at how many Original Ray's Pizza venues there are in New York City. You can tell the real original: it doesn't say "original".

Apple's iPhone -- the Original iPhone!

Is there any more proof than that provided by this current Pied-Piper scenario that money -- especially in committees -- makes you stupid? Why has Andy Lees not evidently read the Cluetrain?

From the demo, it looks like Google's smartphone platform, Android, involves some new user-interface touches and totally new technology (Compass Mode) that will make it a strong competitor to iPhone.

We'll see if iPhone 3G has enough to preserve some distance.

I noted in particular that Android uses the WebKit browser engine (read Safari, iPhone) so Google is not reinventing the wheel here and this mobile browser-rendering experience will likely match the iPhone's. Important, given iPhone's 5.5 million installed base which may grow by another 10 million this year.